The present invention relates to crystallography, and more specifically, to an apparatus for cleaving crystalline materials.
In the semiconductor industry, a monocrystalline wafer of semiconducting or semi-insulating material is commonly used as a substrate material. Many applications, (such as laser diodes), require the fabrication of monocrystalline devices whose physical dimensions are crystallographically perfect, or nearly so. To produce devices of such precise dimension, these monocrystalline materials are often broken along preferred cleavage planes (the [110] planes in gallium arsenide, or the [111] planes in silicon, for example).
Heretofore, a typical method for cleaving wafers was to manually apply a force, concentrated either at a point or along a line, on a major surface of the wafer. This was a time consuming and imprecise operation which often resulted in inaccurate wafer breakage.